History of Korea

The Big Country

History can have a dual role: The one of destroyer or the other of savior. The message a people's history transmits from the past can either kill a people's spirit or empower and magnify. If a people's history has been a past laced with hardship, meekness, subjugation, and servility, no empowerment can be derived from it. This history of hardship has been to today the version being transmitted to the Korean people: nation of meek farmers, always stuck in a peninsula, that they have so much han built up in their psyche, invaded a total of 966 times but somehow survived (am I supposed to be proud of that?), never chose to invade others' domain, a people who have survived many a hardship and subjugation to build a viable nation-state that Korea is today.

The most visible cause of this historical view lies in the Japanese colonial era. Every colonial power does its best to instill a sense of inferiority, defeat, and hopelessness into the psyche of the subjugated. The Japanese did everything their power allowed to do to achieve this end; that included a massive sixteen-year compiling of their version of Korean history, The Chosen-sai (History of Chosen). Chosen-sai essentially has never been discarded, owing to the fact that the founder of the modern South Korean historical academic field, Yi Byong-do, was an active participant in the compiling of the Chosen-sai. But Yi not withstanding, the Japanese didn't get their idea just out of the blue, but rather exploited centuries of sadaejui practiced by the Yi Dynasty. Since sadaejui itself was a self-derogatory ideology that whole-heartedly embraced sinocentrism and the "dominant sinic culture", the foundation for the distortion of Korean history had already been laid, the Japanese just simply built on their version of Korean inferiority on top of another that was already there.

But there is another historical view of Korean history that flies into the face of the present paradigm--minjoksagwan, or nationalist history. Not only does it disclaim everything the present paradigm claims, but paints an incredibly GRAND view of history--Korea was a mighty and powerful continental power, with its territory stretching from Lake Baykal in southern Siberia to the Yangzi river, its inhabitants being powerful warriors called Dong-yi, founders of the so-called Sinic Civilization, the dominant military AND cultural power in East Asia. I can use all the fancy metaphors I want, but the past history of Korea can be summed up in a few short words: IT WAS A BIG COUNTRY. A BIG COUNTRY: a nation ruled by sons of heaven and emperors instead of kings and vassals, rulers rather than the ruled, builders of civilization rather than receivers and transmitters, mighty warriors instead of meek farmers. This is the kind of historical tradition that can instill pride in a people,

The view of Korea as a small country and a big country are diametrically opposed and diverging. But wherever its origins may be and whatever formation process it had, the consequences in the case of prevalence of one view over another will be drastically different. If the former view prevails, then the people will be pretty much satisfied with what they have now: a middle-of-the-road, run-of-the-mill, semi-democratic/capitalistic NIC; Its greatest hope being to surpass Japan someday. If the later view wins out, then they will stop at nothing to make Korea what it once was, A BIG COUNTRY.

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